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The face mask has been going through different iterations lately. I’ve repositioned the camera on the back, added new IR LEDs and diffusers and am now using a lithium-polymer battery instead of a DC converter for all the power. This contrast of the image is helped by the IR LEDs, which makes the viewing angle a bit better as well. I’ve also got my Xbee circuit set up on a perf board as explained in the video and as seen in the pictures below.

Last but certainly not least is the Max patch that I’ve been working on (screen shot / .sit). Compare this new patch with what I was doing in the old version. Many thanks to Luke DuBois for the help with efficiency of parsing in Max and to Rob Faludi for help with general Xbee packet information and for letting me borow his dongle.

Next up is getting more screen for the eyes, then duplicating everything and patching them together wirelessly. Three weeks to go!

…and seven weeks later we have a first post. I’ve tried my hand at meditation6. From Luke’s description:
“this patch textures maps a cube drawn not as a simple primitive (e.g. using [jit.gl.gridshape]) but as a platonic solid. as a result, the texture is mapped across the entire surface of the object, not tiled on each face. The nice thing about platonic solids is that you can independently texture each face of the object by creating a jitter matrix for the texture that contains six tiled images.” And our mission: “change this patch so that you composite individual images for each face of the cube (see the help patch for [jit.gl.plato] for how it works out.) you can use still images, movies, different effects on a similar movie, etc. you’ll need a [jit.matrix] object at some point to do the composition, using the dstdim attributes to place images in different parts of the texture.”

I think I’ve got a variation of a possible solution working, (download the .sitx here) however I still have some questions regarding the size of the platonic solid I am drawing to. How big is it? My source movies, which are 320×240, don’t look too pretty. Is this due to running 5 movies and a live cam all at once? Is this just due to interpolation or lack of interpolation?

I bought a couple of small screens to test from EarthLCD. (The guy I spoke with on the phone was an asshole. Just saying.) The screens are about 5″ each. One is black & white and one is color. The plan is to test these out, and buy more of the one I like better The following are short tests with the screens. Eventually…these will go on my face.

What’s happening: The two camera’s respective signals are being sent across a DPDT (Double Pole Double Throw) relay. One signal and one ground to separate poles on one side. When the relay is thrown either way, one of the two camera’s signals is connected and the image shows on the screen. The relay is being triggered by a lower voltage (5VDC) relay which itself is being thrown by pulling a pin high on an Atmega8. The Atmega8 is reading analog data (pulseIn (Arduino)) being transferred from an Xbee wireless module whose pair Xbee is doing an analog read of a Piezo sensor.

Basically. When the Piezo is shaken enough, the camera is switched. A debounce function is thrown in for good measure.

“I’ve decided to do some sketches. Well, not some…100. I’m going to try to get these things out 25 at a time. Over the course of the next few nights I’ll be taking time lapse video of these improvised sketches in action.” (from the previous post) The second 25 sketches were much harder to complete than the first. I actually had to take a water break after about ten or so sketches. I wasn’t thirsty.

My apologies. I won’t be able to roll these out by the weekend. Spring Break closes the floor Saturday and Sunday so it’s me without my white board. Perhaps I’ll break into the grade school behind my house.

I’m in a rut. I am a highschool lover. I am an adolescent trying to complete his master’s thesis. The thing that is really tying me up is an inability to actually start. To actually dive in. Get physical. Physical. Mostly I’m not 100% sold on my idea. I’m not 100% sure I know exactly what my idea is for that matter.

In lieu of these revelations, I’ve decided to do some sketches. Well, not some…100. I ‘m going to try to get these things out 25 at a time. Over the course of the next few nights I’ll be taking time lapse video of these improvised sketches in action. The documentation is both for archival and motivation. The archival of erased sketches allows me to revisit all off the sketches at a later date in a different medium than the traditional sketch. The motivation is a time-based one. Once the camera starts, it doesn’t stop until all 25 sketches are done.

These sketches are meant to be directly related to my thesis, however, I’m not going to worry about drawing rubbish. Anything and everything will be committed to and not over-thought. In this way, the sketches are an ideation improvisation exercise.

Christian Croft and I revamped a lecture we originally authored for out Every Bit You Make Final last year. Last night we unvieled a really nice new video edited by Christian and a quicker, slicker presentation. We gave the presentation on the floor at ITP and drew a nice crowd. Exactly what we wanted since the main reason for revisiting the lecture is to get some nicer documentation than the talk at EYEBEAM. We plan to use this documentation as a work sample for our submission to Ars Electronica.

All comments go. I’ve decided to allow comments here after not doing so for a long time. I have no idea if anyone have ever wanted to comment. I don’t actually know for certain that anyone actually read this blog. But if you do, and you are a person, and you want to leave your thoughts on what I do here, or about anything in general, now you can…now you can. I am an enabler. On to the booze.

Last week I detailed the construction of what I am now calling the BlinkCam. Unfortunately, I shorted the circuitry of the camera itself. It powers up, but the switches no longer trigger the shutter as intended.

The only solution was to purchase a fresh polaroid for hacking. Same steps as before, and In about a half hour I’ve got myself a working BlinkCam! Check the demo here.

In doing some research for a writing response to an article about Krzysztof Wodiczko, I needed to look through a lot of old footage from my undergrad. I have 40 or 50 Digital8 tapes from those four years that sit in my closet, waitng to be digitized. While looking through that stuff I found my graduate application supplemental materials reel and gave that a gander. It reminded me just how much stuff I used to do that is what I would now consider “analog.” All these different video and photo techniques. Need a Final Cut Pro filter that makes a video look damaged / interference? Why not copy it over to VHS and stick your hands in the VCR to manually disrupt the data. Need the audio to sound tinny and shallow? Record the voice over off of the phone. I guess I still use some of these techniques in my my work, but what really struck me as being different was photography. Spending years in a darkroom, I reviled the advent of digital photography. Where was the art? No process. No chemicals. No blood, sweat ,and tears. I found footage from a shoot I did in completely dark dance studio with pen lights attached to my limbs and the camera set to “bulb” (there is no specific amount of time the shutter knows to stay open, the shutter stays open until it is closed again). See header image for the result of that shoot. I realize I really miss those old photo techniques and so I got out my point and shoot digital camera to see if it has s “bulb” setting. No dice. The best I’ve got on my Canon Powershot A540 is a setting to keep the shutter open for fifteen seconds. That’ll have to do. Extending my procrastination evn further into the night, I used a standalone flash bulb to make the following images: